Some characteristics of the World Wide Web (WWW) and its Virtual Library (W3VL) are described. Aspects of the setting up, maintenance, future development and objectives of the World Wide Web Virtual Library: Crystallography are detailed. An overview of the successful use of WWW in the organisation of two crystallographic conferences and one entirely electronic conference is given. A revolution in scientific publication is under way with the introduction of WWW and CD-ROM technologies and a few of the points important to crystallography are touched upon. An application to distance teaching in crystallography is described. There is no mention of WWW applications to crystallographic databases in this paper as others at the Workshop have adequately described their work.